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students practice the concepts learned in class (i.e., the keys of each section) by writing thesis proposals.
3.3Participants
The participants recruited in this study included six students and three teachers.
Since the purpose of this study is to explore the graduate students as in-service teachers’
thesis writing experience, the student participants were recruited by the following criteria:
first, they must have completed their thesis within three years to make sure they wouldn’t forget their writing process and the curricular design of the thesis writing course they took.
Second, they needed to take the thesis writing course so whether this experience facilitated their thesis writing process could be revealed.
Regarding the teacher participants, they must be the advisors of the student
participants. Also, one of them was the instructor of the thesis writing course. The reason of setting the criteria of choosing teacher participants could be two. First of all, since this study attempted to attain data about students’ writing problems from multiple sources, the advisors could provide information about the difficulties the student participants
encountered in writing theses from their views. Second, the statements of the course instructor could be used to triangulate the student participants’ ideas about the thesis writing course. In short, these teachers were invited to join this study as a way to validate students’ perceptions about the course they took and the writing difficulties they faced.
Therefore, three advisor-advisee groups, including two students and one supervisor in each group, were recruited. That is, a total of nine people partook in this study. The background information about the students and the teachers is displayed in Table 3.1 and Table3.2. Pseudonyms are used to identify individual participants.
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Table 3.1 Demographic Information of the Student Participants
Table 3.2 Demographic Information of the Teacher Participants
From Table 3.1and Table 3.2, we know that Professor A, Lynn, and Claire were the A
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group; Professor B, Helen and Ken formed the B group; the C group was comprised of Professor C, Helen and Sherry. In the A group, Professor A was one of the senior teachers in the English department, and she has taught courses about English teaching methods in the ETMA program since the program was established. She has advised the ETMA students for ten years. Though also teaching the regular graduate students in the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) program, Professors A tended to advise the ETMA students, for she was more interested in the research topics of these students.
Lynn, one of Professor A’s advisees in the present study, has been an elementary school teacher for seven years. She entered the graduate school, for she wanted to acquire more knowledge about teaching theories after having years of teaching experience. Her master’s thesis was a quantitative study which examined the effects of a specific teaching method on the elementary school students’ oral reading fluency. She spent almost a year to complete her thesis, including conducting the study and writing the thesis. Recalling the thesis writing process, she thought Professor A was more like a lighthouse who directed her the right way of writing.
Claire, the other student in the A group, has also taught in elementary school for seven years. Her motivation to study in graduate school was that she wanted to enrich the academic knowledge about English teaching. She conducted a quantitative study about the effects of certain vocabulary exercise on the students’ vocabulary acquisition. In her thesis writing process, Claire also considered professor A as a lighthouse, i.e. a person who could lead her to the right tracks.
As to the members in the B group, Professor B was the instructor of the two courses in the ETMA program: statistics and experimental research design and the teaching of reading and writing. He has advised the ETMA students since seven years ago. One of his advisees participated in the present study, Fiona, has been a junior high school teacher for
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seven years. She furthered her study in graduate school, for she believed the theories taught in the graduate education may be helpful for her teaching. Her study was about the effects of English learning magazines on junior high school students’ listening and
reading comprehension and it was quantitative in nature. In the process of thesis writing, Professor B served as an authority for Fiona, and thus she kept adjusting and revising the drafts of thesis based on Professor B’s suggestions. Ken, the only male student participant in the study, was also Professor B’s advisee. He has taught in junior high school for seven years and decided to be a graduate student, for he thought studying in graduate school was a trend for the school teachers in Taiwan. For his master’s thesis, he explored whether vocabulary proficiency and gender affected the junior high school students’
vocabulary learning strategies with a quantitative method. Knowing how busy Professor B was, Ken especially appreciated Professor B for examining his drafts carefully.
Considering the members of the last group, Professor C, an expert in academic writing, has been the instructor of the “thesis writing” course in the ETMA program for many years. He represented the advisor who had years of advising experience as well as the instructor of the thesis writing course in the present study. Helen was an elementary school teacher who had eight years of teaching experience. She studied in graduate school because she desired to know the theory of specific teaching method and broaden her social network by interacting with the teachers from other schools. Her study focus was on the effects of particular class practice on the learners’ oral expression. For her, professor C was a shy gentleman who was not too close to the students. However, he played as a consultant who was an authority of academy and provided Helen the direction of thinking. Sherry, the other advisee of professor C, was the only student who had the experience of teaching in junior high but was a senior high school teacher now. In addition, she was the only student participant who conducted a qualitative study to explore the influences of the instruction of cohesive device on the coherence of the
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writing of lower achievers. She spent almost two years to complete her thesis for she needed more time to collect and analyze data than her peers who did quantitative research.
With respect to the procedure of finding the participants, all participants were recruited by the following process: Firstly, E-mails about a brief introduction of the study and the consent form (See Appendix A for the teacher’s consent form) were sent to the professors of the ETMA program. Fortunately, four professors showed their willingness to participate in the study, containing the instructor of the thesis writing course. After interviewing the professors, the researcher sincerely asked the professors’ help for introducing two of his/her advisees by stating the criteria of the student participants required in the study. However, one of the professors, professor D, only remembered her latest advisee’s name and this student did not meet the criteria of this study. Considering the difficulties in finding appropriate advisees, the researcher decided not to adopt professor D’s interview data. As to the other three professors, they were willing to introduce two of their previous advisees to the researcher and even forwarded the mail contained consent form (See Appendix B for students’ consent form) to their students.
After receiving the mail of agreement, the researcher made appointments with individual students to do the interviews. Finally, all the participants needed in the study were found.